Ascending I 1958

Alfred Jensen made *Ascending I* with paint. Look at the colours, the way he puts them down in these thick, deliberate stripes. It's like he's building something, brick by brick. You get the sense that artmaking, for him, wasn't just about expression, but about constructing a system, a language. The materiality of this piece hits you right away. It's not subtle, it’s all about surface and texture. You can almost feel the ridges of the paint, see the way each colour sits slightly raised from the canvas. There's one particular black square, thick and almost tarry. It anchors the whole piece, like a void, but also a grounding force. You can feel echoes of Mondrian in Jensen’s work, that same pursuit of underlying structures, but wilder, more intuitive. It's a reminder that art is an ongoing conversation, a back-and-forth across time. It doesn't offer easy answers, but instead opens up spaces for questioning, for seeing the world in new ways.